Reward and punishment

In a fundamental discovery made in 1954, Canadian researchers James Olds and Peter Milner found that stimulation of certain regions of the brain of the rat acted as a reward in teaching the animals to run mazes and solve problems. The conclusion from such experiments is that stimulation gives the animals pleasure. The discovery has also been confirmed in humans. These regions are called pleasure, or reward, centres. One important centre is in the septal region, and there are reward centres in the hypothalamus and in the temporal lobes of the cerebral hemispheres as well. When the ... (100 of 39,412 words)